Good morning, John. It's easy for us Americans to get caught in our bubble.
Especially when things are as weird as they are right now. But the rest of the
world continues to go on, and in Brazil, that means the government kinda totally
falling apart in a way that makes House of Cards look frankly boring.When I asked
about it on Twitter, brazilians mostly sent me gifs to explain how they felt.
I also got a message from a diplomat, in Brazil who told me that Brazilians
have a saying: Brazil is not for beginners. But maybe by the end of this video you
will no longer be a beginner, so let's go there. Brazil is a big country: 200 million
people, as big as the UK, France, and Germany combined. It's also big enough to
fit all those countries inside of it three times at least. It's extremely
ethnically and economically diverse with a wide gap between the richest and the
poorest. That economic gap also falls roughly on racial lines, and also on political
lines with wealthy white people mostly in big cities being mostly conservative,
and poor people of native or African descent being more liberal. Brazil has a
diverse economy. They're the ninth largest producer of oil, the second largest
producer of beef, the third largest producer of iron ore, and and they have the
world's seventh-largest economy. From 1964 to 1985 they were ruled by a
military dictatorship, and in a stunning turn of events that military
dictatorship had a lot of bribery and corruption in it. But in an actual not sarcastic
stunning turn of events Brazil managed to transfer from that military
dictatorship to democracy with relative ease and like sort of slowly
and without very much violence. So it's worth remember throughout this entire process that
though Brazil seems very mature economically and politically, its government
is only thirty years old. It's new, and they haven't been doing it for very long.
It's pretty remarkable. There was plenty of economic and political battles in the nineteen
eighties and nineties but thanks to a lot of hard work, and China's insatiable
appetite for iron ore and hamburgers, Brazil managed to get its economy on
track and it's become one of the great success stories of the developing world.
Until the last couple of years... so remember how bribery and corruption were
really rampant in the old military dictatorship? Well that's a difficult
thing to take out of the culture of both companies and the government, and it has
not been removed in brazil. But over the last thirty years brazil has become more
democratically mature and, somewhat unusually for Latin America, has a really
strong independent judiciary and a really strong independent police force.
So the rock of Brazil's culture of bribery and corruption
has come up against the hard place of its strong independent judiciary,
and something had to break, and it has. But before we get there let's talk about Lula.
Inacio Lula da Silva was, in the eighties, a revolutionary socialists who mostly
worked against the military dictatorship as a union organizer. After the
dictatorship transitioned to democracy, in a very weird cool long story that I don't
have time to tell you,
Lula emerged as a strong political figure and the head of the newly formed Workers
Party. And the Workers Party wasn't able to gain much national traction until
Lula became what some Brazilians called Lula lite; still Lula, still for the
people, still from the poorest part of the country, still representative of that
soul of Brazil, but also willing to work inside of the system, also willing to
help out big corporations who are a big part of Brazil's economy and how Brazil
works. After running in losing three times, lula was elected in 2003 and remained
president until 2011 during which time he presided over some truly remarkable
achievements, including an extremely successful social program that basically
paid poor families to send their children to school, a program that's
credited with helping lift tens of millions of Brazilians out of poverty.
Lula left office with an unprecedented eighty percent approval rating. His chief
of staff, an economist who was once a guerilla fighter against the military
dictatorship and was captured by them and tortured, amazing life this woman has had
and continues to have, was elected pretty much as his successor
because he couldn't run for a third term. Now, Lula was almost never blame free. In
2005, his government was involved in a scandal which saw members of congress
being paid $12,000 a month to vote the way that Lula wanted them to vote, but
Lula was never directly implicated in the scandal, though several members of his
government resigned. In Brazil it has become so common for huge scandals to fizzle
out without anybody getting in trouble that they have a phrase for it. They call
it ending in Pizza. And I'm not saying some Portuguese word that sounds like pizza.
I'm saying pizza. Well the days of things ending in pizza appear to be over, for a
bunch of different reasons. First because of the massive scale of the scandal and
yes we're finally gonna get there. Petrobras is Brazil's only oil company. It's majority
owned by the government, and entirely controlled by the government. It's Brazil's
largest company, one of the world's largest companies, it's responsible for
ten percent of Brazil's GDP and a lot of its government's revenue.
And it spends, as you might expect, a lot of money on construction contracts. And it's maybe
always kind of been the case that high up Petrobras employees and the
government officials who appointed them, because remember Petrobras is controlled by the
Brazilian government, would give contracts to construction companies that overcharged
the government massively, and the CEO of the construction company would pocket
some of the difference and some of the difference would come back to the
politicians and the employees who ya know, helped get them that contract. it's a very
common corruption thing. We have it here in the USA we call it graft. it's
basically just a company bribing a politician for a lucrative contract. And
as Petrobras grew under Lula, thanks mostly to the price of oil getting
really high, the amount getting kicked back grew as well to truly massive
massive proportions. it's the largest corruption scandal in the history of any
democracy on earth, billions of dollars. One guy has offered, because you know
he's scared, to give all of the money that he took in bribes back to the
Brazilian government. That amount of money is a hundred million dollars. one
guy! Many people are going to jail.
This is not ending in pizza. Around a hundred of Brazil's current members of
congress, almost a fifth of the entire body of congress, is under investigation
right now.
No political party is blame free, but the Workers Party, which was in charge
at the time and also supposed to the party against this kind of corruption, is
catching most of the flat. But it's more than just the scale; it's also just awful
timing. People are poised to dislike the government right now because Brazil is
in the middle of a giant recession. The scandal has resulted in lots of loss to
jobs, the zika virus epidemic is hurting tourism, Chinese retraction is terrible
for Brazil, massive trickle-down loans to large corporations didn't spur economic growth,
and if you've been to a gas station recently you know that oil is not the
profit center it once was. All is difficult for politicians and citizens. Brazil has had
to implement austerity measures to get its budget in line with its revenue, but
it's more than just the scale, and the awful timing, Brazil also really mostly
doesn't like the current president. They just don't like her. Two-thirds of the
country, according to a recent poll, want her to be impeached. But it's more than just
the scale, and the economy, and the president that nobody likes, it's also
Judge Moro, a guy who's taking lessons from the nineties campaign in Italy to
take down the mafia, a guy who's willing to make deals with criminals if it means
uncovering more of the scandal, a guy who doesn't mind bending the rules of it
means getting support from the public, and the guy who doesn't seem to mind
being deified and exalted by a lot of the Brazilian public searching for some
non political person to put their faith in. Brazilians have taken a lot of the
love that they lost for Lula and put it into Judge Moro. He says he has no
interest in politics but he doesn't really seem to be acting that way, and if
Rousseff is impeached, and there are two current hearings trying to impeach her, a
lot of people would like judge Moro to run. But it's more than just the scale, and
the economy, and the president, or the charismatic judge who takes no prisoners,
are rather takes lots of prisoners, it's also the deep kinda ugly partisan divide
in Brazil. No one knows how involved Rousseff and Lula were in the Petrobras
scandal or if they were involved at all, but it doesn't seem like anybody's waiting
for due process to make their judgments. In a story that might feel pretty
familiar to people in america, social media has hyperpolarized Brazil. People in
Brazil spent a lot of time on social media, and their filter bubbles are just as
strong as ours. People tend to hear and thus think just the worst things about
their opposition, and everyone's cynicism about everyone else, which I admit is
kind of Justified, results in a lack of skepticism about negative stories of the
opposition. And I'm not saying this is a unique problem to Brazil. But like when judge
Moro released a recorded telephone conversation in which Rousseff appeared to be
telling lula how she would protect him from prosecution, a lot of people thought
how could anyone still be supporting these people they are so obviously
corrupt, but a lot of other people thought why is it judge taking this
seemingly political action in making this recording public a mere three hours
after it was recorded without due process? Lula and Rousseff say it is just a hundred percent
partisan attacks trying to take them down and have the opposition parties
gain political power. The oposition says that it's a hundred percent just them trying to get
to the bottom of the scandal. Even a cursory inspection though shows that it
is definitely both of those things. In response to her plummeting approval
ratings and multiple impeachment hearings and also possibly to protect him from
prosecution, Rousseff has brought lula on as her chief of staff. And if that seems fishy,
it's because it is. But also the more conservative parties, some of them fed by
classism and racism, are definitely using this as a political opportunity to gain
power. Meanwhile, on the left a lot of people are saying the Workers Party is way too
centrist,
and obviously corrupt, and are running away from them toward the left and
that's just creating a deeper partisan divide inside the country. But every major
party is involved. Five of the people on Rousseff's impeachment committee are
under investigation themselves! Many of the most respected leaders in the
country are not gonna make it out of this unescathed, which means it's going to
be hard for Brazil to lead its way out of this problem. But it isn't just the bribery
that's the problem.
Paulo Maluf, who literally can't leave Brazil because he's wanted by
Interpol, ran for re-election and won with a campaign slogan: I steal, but I
deliver. Lula on the other hand has had his own quote from 1988 thrown back at him
on every social media platform on the internet: "In Brazil, when a poor man steals
he goes to jail. When a rich man steals, he becomes a minister." Many Brazilians
now see this as Lula predicting his own future. Now this is all bad in the near
term for Brazil, but I think it's good for Brazil in the long term because it
shows that being a crooked politician is not worth it.
as for what happens tomorrow and the next day nobody knows. It's a bad situation, and
Brazilians on the whole are very cynical about the government, but they're also
very pragmatic. While passions can certainly run high in individuals,
there's an overall culture of peaceful evolution rather than violent revolution,
and very few people seem at all interested in giving that up which is
great news.
John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
Thank you to diplomat Rafael Prince, and journalist and author Alex Cuadros for
all of your help. Alex's book Brazllionaires will be out in July. And thank you as
was well to all of the members of the Brazilian Nerdfighter Facebook group
thanks for helping me out and keeping me straight.